The Return of the Stone Tablets - America’s God Delusion in the 21st Century

It begins with ten sentences, carved in stone, that have survived for thousands of years. In Texas they are now to serve once again as a moral compass - not in churches, but in classrooms. Attorney General Ken Paxton orders that the Ten Commandments must hang in all schools starting September 1, except for those protected by lawsuits. It is the triumph of a movement that presents itself as the guardian of values and in truth undermines the foundation of a liberal democracy. The hypocrisy jumps out at you. The same politicians who trivialize corruption, indulge gun fetishes and lock migrant children in camps suddenly want to be guardians of moral heritage. The same hands that bend laws and intimidate judges now raise Moses’ tablets as a banner of alleged virtue. Let us be clear: this is not about morality, but about power. Not about faith, but about control. America is experiencing a religious return that has more to do with coercion than with inspiration. What is sold as “Christian heritage” is nothing less than a new form of state religion. The Bible becomes a political weapon, the classroom an altar, the student a target of ideological indoctrination. Behind the pathos of “tradition” and “values” lies the simple strategy: one nation under God - but only under the God of the Right.

What is happening in Texas resembles less a modern democracy than the mechanisms of fundamentalist regimes. When an attorney general dictates to schools to hang religious commandments on their walls, it differs little in logic from the Taliban forcing Koran verses into classrooms. The state makes itself the enforcer of a doctrine of faith that suppresses diversity and stigmatizes dissent. It is the creeping transformation of an open society into a theocracy in which it is no longer the law but religion that has the last word. That this is happening in a country whose constitution established the separation of church and state as a protective wall is more than irony, it is a bankruptcy declaration.

A state that preaches the diversity of its citizens and at the same time hammers a single belief system into the heads of children betrays its own foundations. It is a perfidious spectacle: while judges in the courts argue over constitutionality, politicians already declare victory. While the pulpits of the South invoke “religious freedom,” that very freedom is being abolished - quietly, but mercilessly. You can feel it: this is not about God. It is about power, about culture war, about the last bastion of a party that has nothing left to offer but the specter of the “woke radicals.” Paxton talks about “virtues and values” that supposedly made America great. What he means is submission to a religiously cloaked order in which doubt, diversity and criticism are treated as sins. An order that shapes students into believers before they can become citizens.

The absurdity is almost unbearable. A country where people die every day from gun violence prefers to hang the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” in classrooms rather than stop the flow of weapons. A country that locks children in cages at the border proclaims “Honor thy father and mother.” A country whose political elite sinks into its own swamp of corruption preaches “Thou shalt not steal.” The hypocrisy screams to heaven, and yet it is sold as patriotic duty. America’s God delusion has long since crossed the threshold of ridiculousness and has become a danger. It replaces politics with preaching, arguments with dogma, democracy with theocratic symbols. Whoever resists is defamed as an enemy of the nation. It is a culture war that knows no measure because it anchors itself in the absolute: God against humanity, Bible against Constitution, faith against reason. When September 1 arrives and the tablets hang on the walls in Texas, it will not smell of religion, but of rot. It is the stench of a power that cloaks itself in morality while destroying the foundation of a pluralistic society. It is the grimace of a politics that invokes heaven in order to create hell on earth.

Investigative journalism requires courage, conviction – and your support.